


in the middle

by warandrunning



Series: matchflare [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, and she makes an ass of herself, but it all turns out fine, featuring:, in which June's got it bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-01 13:16:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18335096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warandrunning/pseuds/warandrunning
Summary: “Thought you’d be gone at least a week,” she says. That’s the god’s honest truth. Usually when Deacon has a feeling, he takes the long way round, running right in the opposite direction before circling back to it.—June and Deacon have a conversation about what they are.





	in the middle

_ “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” — Jane Austen,  Pride and Prejudice _

—

 

_ Providence safehouse, north of Boston, April 2291 _

June’s used to her door swinging open these days. Between Shaun running around and the constant flow of agents crashing, laying low, and generally making themselves at home on her little ranch, she’s tempted to take the damn thing off its hinges just so she doesn’t have to hear it slam anymore.

So it’s more than welcome, on a few levels, when Deacon slips in late one night, easing the door open and shut without a sound.

“Hiya, sunshine,” he murmurs, mouth teasing up in a sideways grin. The house key glints in the candlelight as he pockets it.

“Hi yourself,” June replies with a mirrored smile. She kicks out the chair next to her at the kitchen table.

Deacon slides into the offered seat, propping his feet up on June’s chair next to her thigh. “Two questions,” he says, lifting a pair of fingers at her. “What are you doing up so late, and what are you drinking there?”

She pushes her tin mug toward him, shrugs, and says, “Couldn’t sleep.”

He brings the mug to eye level and swirls, tilting an ear to listen to the liquid slosh and closing his eyes in mock appreciation. He puts his nose to the mug’s rim and breathes in deep, then whistles low. “Jee-hesus, Fixer, this’ll put you on your ass for sure.”

“That’s the idea.” She grins.

Deacon takes a sip and cringes, then returns the mug to June’s waiting hands. “Self-medicating?”

She sighs and leans back in her seat, shifting so her legs line up with his across their chairs. “You remember how this goes, right? You ask a question, I ask a question. You’re really racking them up.”

“Such a stickler.” He tilts his chin at her. “Everything a-okay here?”

June waves a dismissive hand. “Yeah, fine, just — nightmares again. You know.” 

She can’t see his eyes, but she feels them on her all the same. “Oh, don’t give me that look,” she mutters, and takes a swig of her tea.

Deacon takes his sunglasses off in a gesture that’s meant to be casual. “What look?” he says, busying himself with cleaning the lenses on his shirt. “There’s no look. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He carefully hooks his glasses on the collar of his shirt and gives June an entirely different look, eyebrows up and eyes round in a picture of innocence.

She stares back at him until she can’t keep a straight face anymore, and when her mouth melts into a messy, wide grin, so does Deacon’s. After a moment, June tears her eyes from Deacon to take another drink of her tea, growing cooler by the second.

They’re quiet while she sips, and when she sets her mug down, she asks, still smiling, “Are you done with the interrogation now? Is it my turn to ask the questions?”

Deacon inclines his head toward her and gestures broadly. “Ask away.” Then — “Wait, hold the phone, I need some of that liquid courage,” and he grabs her mug and drains it. He coughs, likely more for dramatic effect than anything, then props his chin in his hands and blinks at her. 

“How’d it go?”

Deacon leans back in his chair and shrugs expressively. “Chasing more ghosts,” he says. June tilts her head at him, and he keeps talking. “It’s been almost four years. If our missing Ticon guys haven’t turned back up by now, they’re dead or they don’t want to be found.”

She nudges his hip with her foot and gives him a sad smile. “I’m sorry, D. I miss them, too.”

He just shrugs again. “Anyway. Next question?”

June eyes him for a moment, wondering whether it’s worth it to try to get him to keep talking about his latest side project. He doesn’t seem too perturbed, just tired, so he’ll probably be fine if they move on.

“Okay, next question,” she says. “When are you headed back out?”

Deacon stretches and leans back to stare at the ceiling, folding his hands behind his head. “Dunno. Thought I might stick around for a minute,” he says, glancing down his nose at her. “That is, if the boss doesn’t mind.”

“In that case, you’re gonna have to talk to Shaun when he gets back from Diamond City.” It’s stupid, but June can’t help grinning at him again. He’s only been gone a month — they’ve gone longer without seeing each other — but the sight of him back in her kitchen, bright and safe and at least momentarily happy, never gets old. 

June gets up to refill her mug, and rummages through the cabinets looking for the bottle of whiskey before she remembers she left it out by the stove.

“You want some?” June turns to look at Deacon, raising the kettle in his direction.

“Mm?” He lolls his head toward her, expression loose and open, and June’s voice gets lodged in the base of her throat. 

Even now, after years together, every time Deacon shows her his eyes it feels like a privilege. They’re back to blue with his latest surgery — almost a year ago now? — the same blue as when they’d first met. The question she’d meant to repeat dies on her tongue, and instead June wonders aloud, “Is that your real eye color?”

She can’t help but study how his face moves, the way his mouth twitches and the corners of his eyes crinkle as he considers her question.

“No,” he says after a pause, voice soft, “but I like this one.”

And between his voice and his eyes and the way he’s resting his chin on his fist — and maybe the tea that’s more warm bourbon — June wants nothing more than to kiss him, right then, to just lean over him and cup his jaw in her hands and steal the smile from his mouth.

That wouldn’t be fair, though. 

So instead, while she’s thinking about combing her fingers through his salt-and-ginger hair, she asks again, “Want some tea?”

But she doesn’t hear his answer, because she’s also thinking about telling him. The timing’s not right, but it never is, and this yearning uncertainty has suddenly become so unbearable June thinks she might just implode, so she makes a decision: She sets the kettle down and sits across from him at the table, and she says, “Deacon, listen.”

He sees the change in her and mirrors it, sitting up straight even as his eyebrows fold together.

“We’ve been partners a long time now, and you’ve helped me get through — through some of the toughest times in my life,” she pauses, struggling for the right words. She’d expected Deacon to butt in by now with some quippy joke, but he’s just looking at her, eyes wide and serious. So she keeps going.

“Deacon, I want you to know that you’re important to me. And I care about you,” she pauses again, and Deacon’s still silent. “As more than — friends, or coworkers, or whatever we are.”

June’s said a lot of stupid things over the past 40 years. That has to be the stupidest. And Deacon’s still not talking, so driven by some horrible compulsion, June keeps running her mouth.

“Look, it’s not like I’m trying to drag you into bed with me tonight. I just — I wanted you to know. And I guess,” she sighs and stares up at the ceiling before looking back down at him, “I wanted to know if you feel the same.”

Deacon’s become super interested in the middle distance past June’s shoulder, and his face has gone still — not cold or closed, but it’s still a far cry from the unguarded access that June’s gotten used to having.

“Can I—” he clears his throat. “Can I get back to you on that?”

“Uh,” June says as Deacon jerks out of his chair. “Take all the time you need?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna — I’m gonna turn in,” he says, and it should be funny when he bumps into the kitchen counter when he leaves, but June’s mostly reeling from how fucking awkward all of that was.

—

The sun rises bright and clear, and Deacon is gone.

June wishes she was more surprised. But there’s work to be done and she doesn’t have time to overthink it, so after breakfast and coffee she brings her two trainees to the barn and the communications array there.

The winter was mild — practically nonexistent — this year, and the summer heat is setting in early. But the morning breeze drifts through the wide open doors and unshuttered windows to cool the back of June’s neck and tease the pages of her open codebooks.

It’s rare to have two new agents come through at the same time, but this pair started together. They don’t talk much about where they came from; Deacon scooped them up a couple months back when they tripped a wire in the ruins of the Old North Church, clutching an old recruitment tape of Desdemona’s. 

They’re plenty good in a fight, but their tradecraft is lacking, to put it lightly. So, on top of the three other agents June is working on post-mission debriefings with, she’s teaching these two how to write in code, send dead drop messages, all that jazz. 

It reminds her of — herself, back in the day. The Railroad’s methods are a little more sophisticated now than when Deacon first showed her the ropes, but the concepts are the same, and June finds herself repeating what Deacon told her, all those years ago:

“Vary your pattern,” he’d said, “but stay within your profile. You never know who’s watching, and who’s gonna notice when you do something weird.”

She’d laughed at him then — “Literally what is my profile? I don’t even have a home and I’m always on the move. I don’t think we need to worry about someone flagging ‘weird movements’ from me.”

He’d conceded, but the point remained, and remains: Don’t look like you’re trying to do something sneaky, and no one will think you’re trying to do something sneaky.

The sting of that memory pricks behind her eyes before it shivers down her neck and settles in her ribcage, tightening around her lungs so she can hardly breathe. Deacon didn’t say anything when he took off, didn’t even leave a note, and June’s spent all morning trying not to read into it — but Deacon always says goodbye before he leaves. It was a thing they started, when she decided to stay put and establish this safehouse but he couldn’t manage to sit still and the pair of them had to adapt.

For him to go without a “see you later” is a rattling disruption of their routine, and June’s left feeling out-of-sorts and disconnected. To be fair, though, she’d disrupted their routine pretty thoroughly last night. 

June sighs and forces herself to bring her attention back to the pair and the message they’re working on translating. Harper had promised they’d come by to help with training this afternoon, and that can’t come soon enough. So when it’s time to break for lunch, June shamelessly reminds Harper of that.

“Working me like a dog here, Fixer,” Harper says, passing June a bowl of baked tatos to put at the table. “Thought this place was supposed to be for recuperation.”

“Think again, kiddo,” June says. So after lunch, she leaves Harper and the two new kids to their work.

Harper’s got just as much experience as June at this point, and they can more than handle the training for now — so it’s just a matter of June finding some other way to keep herself busy so she doesn’t spiral. Shaun is in D.C. for the month for school, and the two agents here for debriefing are still working on their written reports, so June finds herself drawn toward the goats grazing in the pasture next to the barn.

And that’s how she spends the rest of her afternoon: fruitlessly brushing tangles and mats out of her goats’ fur and letting the babies climb all over her, and trying and failing not to think about how thoroughly she might have fucked up.

—

Clouds rolling in from the south warn of a radiation storm coming in, and June is guiding the goats into the barn for the night when movement on the road catches her eye. She turns to look, shading her eyes against the green-tinged setting sun, and — oh. It’s him.

So June pushes the goats inside and locks them in, then makes her way to the edge of her property and leans up against the open gate to watch him approach. His hands are in his pockets, trying to look casual as he saunters down the road. 

He doesn’t say anything until he stops right in front of her. Then it’s just: “Uh, hi.”

June’s eyebrow twitches up. “That’s it? That’s what you’re going with?”

“No — that’s not — what did you expect?” Deacon scuffs at the dirt with the toe of his boot. “You know I’m no good at this shit.”

June works to keep her mouth straight. That he came back at all tells her enough, but that won’t stop her from milking this for all it’s worth. “What shit?”

“Fixer—” He stops up short. “June. I’m sorry I left like that. But I’ve never — in this line of work it’s not safe to get attached. It’s dangerous. Caring is bad for business. But then there’s you, and you care about everyone, all the time, and you say you care about  _ me _ , stupid, lucky bastard that I am—” 

June steps toward him till they’re a breath apart and takes the sunglasses off his face, fingers brushing his cheekbones. His eyes dart back and forth between hers, but he doesn’t look away. 

“Thought you’d be gone at least a week,” she says. That’s the god’s honest truth. Usually when Deacon has a feeling, he takes the long way round, running right in the opposite direction before circling back to it. So him being back so soon either bodes very well, or very not-well, and based on the way he’s looking at her, she’s willing to bet which it is. The grin she’s been fighting off twists her mouth around. “Are you going soft on me or something?”

“C’mon, throw me a bone here.” Deacon’s hand comes up to run through his hair, then falls limp to his side.

June copies the motion, brushing her fingers feather-light across his hairline, then down his temple, his cheek, his jaw. Deacon catches her hand and pulls it to his chest, then curves his other hand around the back of her neck to close the little distance left between them. 

June’s breath catches when their mouths meet, his lips pressing against hers soft and slow. Drenched in body heat and sunshine, Deacon’s T-shirt is warm where her palm is pressed between his hand and his heart. She pulls closer, fingers twisting into his shirt while her other arm winds around his waist. He responds in kind, cupping the back of her head and pressing in a sly way that deepens the kiss — until they’re startled apart by a sharp wolf whistle from behind June.

She whips around to see the cluster of kids she’s been taking care of lined up on the porch, clapping and whistling.

“Don’t you little assholes have work to do?” June hollers.

Harper rests their chin in their hands as they lean over the railing. “Yeah, but this is way better,” they respond with a shit-eating grin.

When June turns back to Deacon, he’s not paying any mind to their audience — he’s just staring at her, eyes bright with unguarded wonder. Looking at him makes her heart ache, so June closes her eyes and presses her forehead to his. 

“Should we give them the satisfaction?” she says.

“Might as well,” Deacon replies, and he kisses her again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! I'm restivewit on Tumblr and I'm still in Fallout hell.


End file.
